Her natural state
By Casey Gillis on Jun. 24, 2009
By Casey Gillis
(434) 385-5525
Dede Buhler greets you at the back door of her Boonsboro Road home, a brick bungalow hidden behind some trees.
Dressed down in a green shirt, black pants and flip flops, with her blond hair pulled back, she extends her hand, which is covered in smudges of blue paint.
“This is dried,” she says, laughing. “I figured you’d want to see me in my natural state.”
Flashing a grin, Buhler leads you back to her bathroom, which doubles as an art studio.
A large canvas, covered in blue and green paint, sits on the white tiled floor next to bottles of acrylic paint and a silver hairdryer that’s as speckled with paint as her hands.
Buhler rarely uses a paintbrush, preferring to pour paint on the canvas in a stream-of-consciousness approach.
“Acrylics dry within minutes. You’ve got to work fast,” she says. “When I’m pouring paint, I have to let go because what’s going to happen is going to happen. It keeps me working fast and loose.
“It’s all a way to help me let go and not over-think things. It lets me focus on the message that’s coming out of me, the feeling, without worrying about painting a pretty picture.”
That certainly doesn’t mean the results aren’t pretty.
Local artist and gallery owner Kelly Mattox describes Buhler’s work as “very powerful and very bold.”
A selection of Buhler’s canvases are on display at Mattox’s Avenue Arts Studio Gallery on Rivermont Avenue; they will remain up through the end of the month.
“She has her own voice,” Mattox says of her friend. “She’s honoring that process, which is the most important thing. She’s doing it for herself. That’s what art should be.”
A Montana native, Buhler moved to Blacksburg with her family at a young age and grew up there. Both of her parents worked at Virginia Tech, her father as a psychology professor and her mother as a graphic artist.
Buhler, an art major at Tech, followed in her mother’s footsteps, but didn’t find the work satisfying after she graduated in the mid-1980s.
Relocating to Washington, D.C., “I realized graphic artists don’t make enough to live on starting up there,” she says.
Instead, Buhler got into real estate, one of several endeavors she’d pursue over the next 20 years before returning to art. She also worked as a personal trainer, and later started renovating and flipping houses and designing landscapes.
“That was sort of the mode I was in when I moved here,” she says.
That was 12 years ago. Buhler opened Nest, her own landscaping and interior design business, through which she met her husband, Michael (the pair married seven years ago and have four children between them).
Then, about two years ago, “I was completely struck with the need to express myself.”
And the only way she could think to do it was through art.
She bought a 4-by-5 foot canvas and, using a huge paintbrush and 20-year-old acrylic paints mixed with latex house paint, completed her first piece (she started the pouring technique later).
Buhler then went on a tear, painting “like crazy,” and entered her work into Lynchburg’s Kaleidoscope, where she eventually sold seven paintings.
Now, she says, she’s completely obsessed and “shirking all my responsibilities.
“It’s just something I have to do right now.”
She tries to paint every day, as long as the conditions — and her state of mind — are right.
“If I’m in a bad mood, I’m not going to paint. I’ve got to have a nice, quiet mind, and I have to do it when nobody’s home.
“I think there’s a point in every day when I would be able to meet those parameters.”
It often takes her as long to clean up the bathroom as it does to finish a painting.
The worst, though, is when she uses red paint.
“I tell people, ‘Don’t worry. It’s not a crime scene in there,’” Buhler laughs. “I’ve been painting.”
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